


eros: a study

by maelidify



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: 18+, Consensual Non-Consent, F/M, I just don't write healthy non-coping-mechanism sex????, Kinda Dark, Lucy is a nerd, Roleplay, Season/Series 02, canon divergent after their couch moment, guys... I don't know, ish, psychological piece I guess, wherein I continue to think of different ways they could have gotten handsy in the bunker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 01:35:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17478755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: History depends on context, and so do relationships.





	eros: a study

**Author's Note:**

> Two things:  
> 1.) The sex in this isn't _that_ explicit but please don't read this if you're under 18.  
> 2.) This story involves some non-con fantasy and consensual non-con roleplay in sex. If that kind of subject matter triggers you, please stay safe and pass this one by.

“Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.”

—Robert Penn Warren

* * *

  
It is 5:01 AM and Lucy Preston is staring at a wall outside the bathroom in the bunker she currently calls home, breathing in a slow, deliberate fashion and trying to slip into what she used to call _grad school brain_.  
  
It’s important for things to have a proper context. Take the context away, the _thing/concept/whatever_ just exists in a void. History depends on context, and so do relationships. Chemistry depends on context. Love, possibly, might surpass it, but Lucy hasn’t been all too successful in that area. It just hasn’t been important or (more recently, given what happened between her and Wyatt), properly executed.  
  
Anyway it’s five in the morning and this is what she is recovering from: a minute earlier, walking into the bathroom to see one Garcia Flynn, sans shirt, leaning over the sink to shave his stubble.  
  
(“Uh,” she said, and quickly backtracked out of the bathroom.)    
  
Leaning against the wall, Lucy considers the reasons why her particular state of mind is profoundly unfair, which include:  
  
1.) No one else is supposed to be awake and  
2.) she is a professional, a published writer and professor with a PhD and all sorts of other impressive letters after her name and a recent time traveler to boot so  
3.) all of those things shouldn’t be wiped away by the sight of a man who is not wearing a shirt.  
  
The door creaks open and Flynn pokes his head out. This whole thing is an occurrence she should have prepared for. She knew when she helped bust him out of prison that he wasn’t going to retreat to some apartment at the edge of town at the end of each assignment (though they’ve only had the one trip together so far). It shouldn’t be jarring, and there are too many reasons why it is, reasons that fill her head like so many crumpled, confusing pieces of paper.  
  
“Lucy,” he says, “I don’t bite.” He has thrown a gray tee-shirt on, perhaps as a gesture of goodwill. He smiles.

 

* * *

  
When Jan-Erik Olsson walked into a bank in 1973 with a submachine gun, the youngest of his four to-be hostages was a 23-year-old woman named Kristin Enmark. Though very much a historian and not a psychologist, Lucy once published an article on the impact of the incident on contemporary social consciousness.  
  
“Believe it or not,” Enmark was reported to have said, “but we’ve had a really nice time here.”  
  
Lucy was only firmly kidnapped by Flynn the one time (minus that brief encounter in the 70s), and it was short-lived, and she’d wriggled her way out of it fairly easily. So the Olsson situation (known commonly as Stockholm Syndrome) isn’t a diagnosis and is even less of an explanation, as much as she’d like one.  
  
Still. There is a pile of blank papers in the room she shares with Jiya, and no concrete research to be conducted on more important matters, and scholar-nerds do as scholar-nerds do.

* * *

  
The next morning at breakfast, Rufus and Jiya still keep their distance from Flynn in spite of his help in Salem. He probably doesn’t resent them too much for it, Lucy speculates, trying not to fix her eyes on him as he grabs an entire cereal box and retreats to his room, a stiff shadow. Their history is their history, and context needs to be acknowledged before it can change.  
  
But she is the unofficial Flynn ambassador, so maybe it’s her duty to speed the process along.  
  
“We’re all on the same side,” she says quietly, knowing fully well how to command a room in spite of vocal volume. Skills one picks up from lecturing. “We need to start acting like it.”  
  
“But,” Rufus says, holding up a finger as though to counterpoint, “it’s not _not_ weird. Right? Like we can’t just pretend this is normal?”   
  
“Nothing about this is normal,” Jiya says morosely. She is right. And on the list of not normal things: the fact that Wyatt is not at breakfast with them, presumably due to being preoccupied with the bunker’s newest inhabitant, who is his not!dead wife, which is a situation Lucy quickly and carefully stops thinking about.  
  
But, says a sneaky voice in the back of her head, it is absence that provides the most information.

* * *

  
“The third stage of the process is, perhaps, the one most familiar to readers today. It has been named the compensatory stage....Wherever possible, the gaps in the historical record are being filled in.” 

—Mary T. Malone, Reading Women into History, _Women in Christianity_

* * *

  
Lucy has always been well aware of the necessity of compensation in historical analysis. It is often used in terms of women, for instance—if a document details a rule silencing women, for example, then the implication is that women were speaking, and persistently.  
  
She feels bad for hijacking feminist analysis for this but—it’s just that it all comes down to the space between things.  
  
(She is writing when the alarm goes off, and she doesn’t hear it and keeps writing, comfortably ensconced in a research project that will be, she knows, pointless to their mission.    
  
It is Wyatt who hovers in her doorway and then says, quietly, “Come on.”  
  
She looks up. “Shit. Sorry,” she says, and stuffs the papers under her mattress.)

* * *

  
That one time Flynn kidnapped her, he’d grabbed her wrist. Dragged her off. An infuriating storm of a man. At the time, she’d been her own kind of storm of self-doubt and weariness and a kind of stubborn interest. A thought process somewhere between _I can outsmart this asshole_ and _it would really suck to die before I figure out what any of this means_.

  
A few nights later, safely back with her own group, she’d had a dream: Flynn dragging her away by the wrist. Flynn pressing her against the wall (the wall? What wall? Where did the wall come from?) by the wrist, or was it by the neck? Something furious, animalistic there.

  
Then she kissed him, and he shot President Lincoln.

* * *

  
“Who ever desires what is not gone? No one.” 

-Anne Carson, _Eros the Bittersweet  
_

 

* * *

 _  
_ The day passes with the proper amount of distractions. She hates being injured and left behind, and when a young John F. Kennedy comes back in place of Flynn, she is surprised at the quick, strange disappointment that shocks through her.  
  
She should be excited? _It’s John F. Kennedy_.    
  
When he comes back later—  
  
When he comes back later—  
  
Later, she sits on the couch, ignoring her own restlessness. Giving depression its due. He sits down next to her on the couch and hands her a beer, which she accepts.  
  
_It Happened One Night_ isn’t a sufficient distraction. She side-eyes Flynn, who is wearing a gray sweatshirt and still manages to look somewhat long and lean, like a hungry cat. Maybe not hungry, though, not right now. He’s letting himself sink into solidarity.  
  
It still occurs to her that it’s _funny_ that he always looks lean, but those arms... when revealed to the world, they’re quite something. She shivers at the memory of him in the bathroom, and of the dream she’d had, and turns to him.  
  
“I never apologized about the other morning,” she says. He looks confused for a moment and then laughs softly.  
  
“Lucy, that was nothing to apologize for.”  
  
She wants to say _we all have things to apologize for, don’t we?_ but she also wants to somehow seduce him into distracting her from her misery so, in order to neutralize both impulses, she tries to say nothing.  
  
It’s a very specific thing that she wants, and it barely involves him at all.  
  
She opens her mouth, and then she closes it. And then she walks away, to the pile of books she’d taken from her and Jiya’s room.  
  
He follows since it’s just the kitchen table.  
  
“Is this, um, this project one you’re familiar with?” she asks, too quickly. Her hands curl over the copy of Anne Carson’s book, which is about the triangulation of desire (where the formula is a triumvirate: person A, person B, and the necessary space between them). She isn’t talking about Eros the Bittersweet, though.  
  
The papers are abstract, but it’s clear what they’re talking about. What she’s asking of him.  
  
His face is contemplative when she looks over. Nearly pained. He is staring at her scattered papers covered in quotes and theories.  
  
“I’ve tried to figure it out,” he says, which confirms what she’d thought, that some of the torn pages stuffed into his copy of the diary are from this. “Your detour into desire, into little intellectual fantasies. That dream you had. What it is that you want me to do about it.”  
  
He looks almost angry, and she doesn’t blame him. No one likes to be reduced to a caricature. But he says it from behind her, and the words are almost in her ear. She’s tempted to lean back into him and see what happens.  
  
“You don’t have to,” she says, suddenly nervous. “It’s just—” and how do you tell a man that you need him to distract you from another man utilizing the darkness he carries in his own past? It’s heartbreakingly selfish. “It’s a distraction,” she tries, “and tension—”  
  
“No it isn’t,” he says, and it’s definitely in her ear and more or less a growl. She shivers.  
  
“You think you know me so well,” she says, accusatory.  
  
“Well, I certainly know what you want right now,” he says, and doesn’t sound impressed. “Well? What is your safe word?”  
  
She is taken aback by the swift (apparent) willingness. “What?”  
  
He sighs into her hair, but his next words are gentler. “If you want me to behave like an animal, we’ll need to take precautions.”  
  
So they’re doing this. He still sounds pissed but one hand is caressing her jaw, slowly making its way to the column of her neck, and she shivers. Maybe this is a bad idea, but maybe it’s the space between bad idea and good idea that is jolting her alive right now.  
  
“Candy,” she says, because of how sweet this tastes.

* * *

 

(Lucy’s skills in the humanities are mainly limited to analysis, compensatory or otherwise, as well as near photo-perfect memorization of fact. Still, she took English classes. “Every woman loves a Facist,” Sylvia Plath once wrote.)

 

* * *

  
After a short and practical conversation, he drags her firmly but quietly (given how he is still regarded among the others) to his sparse room.  
  
“What now?” he says, letting go, and he’s looking at her with sharp, dark eyes. She wonders if he gets anything out of this for himself.  
  
“Is this just for me?”   
  
“Isn’t it?” he says sardonically. Then he crowds her against the wall and, when she makes to remove his sweatshirt, grabs both of her wrists.  
  
“You always want it both ways,” he hisses. “The offensive and the defensive.” (She realizes he is talking about their war with Rittenhouse.) “The active and the passive.” (She realizes he is no longer talking about that.)  
  
“Why don’t you stop talking?”   
  
“I don’t think you get to tell me what to do,” he says, “when we’re doing this.” And he presses closer and she feels breathless with the sheer power of him. It’s like there’s a thin flame between her thighs, melting wax and all.  
  
(Suddenly, the mask slips. The monster fades and his grip loosens. “I’ll be this for you,” he says softly, “but you can stop it at any time.”   
  
“I don’t want to stop it,” she says, and is it a flash of sadness before he growls again? Does it matter?)    
  
He leans his head into the juncture of shoulder and neck, and the bite’s pain grows into something searing. She thrashes against him to no avail—but does not say the safeword.  
  
His hardness is there, pressing up against her when he lets go, looking her in the eye.  
  
“Stay there,” he says, and takes off the sweatshirt. She watches, impressed and undone, the lines of his arms, now just slightly more revealed to her. He sees her seeing. “Undress,” he adds, impatiently.    
  
She obeys, fingers shaking, until she is stripped down to her underwear. She goes to unclasp her bra but he shakes his head.  
  
“No, no, turn around,” he orders, and then it's his fingers on the clasp and sliding the straps from her shoulders, (too) gently tracing down her shoulders and arms, up the curve of her throat before tangling them in her hair. He tugs as he leans in to pull her earlobe between his teeth.  
  
He’s taking his time, when she just wants a quick and monstrous fuck.  
  
Asshole.  
  
“Aren’t you going to undress any more than that?” she asks, aware, as the words leave her mouth, that their states of undress further heighten the power imbalance. He’s still wearing pants and a tee-shirt.  
  
His fingers slip beneath the band of her underwear, circling her clit without fully pressing into it. She can’t resist the moan that emerges, but she can quiet it into her elbow. As she does this, his other hand comes up and circles her nipple softly, pressing it into a peak.  
  
“I don’t know that I am,” he says. She tries to turn around and he won’t let her; instead, he releases her breast and holds her jaw, her back to his front, fingers light but commanding on her neck. There it is, the visitor, pressing into her lower back. Instinctively, she presses into it, and he grits out a laugh.  
  
“You want this over with quickly?” he says, and the words are almost mocking.  
  
No, she didn’t _say_ that, but does the man have to be so painstakingly slow?  
  
She opens her mouth and closes it again. Then she decides, and says, “To hell with this,” and presses into him again, just to see what happens.  
  
He laughs in her ear.

 

* * *

  
There are excuses that need to be sorted and categorized, like: 

  
A.) If an idea starts to haunt you, you have to get that idea. Let it take control for a while. Do the research, the writing, get it out of your system and also  
B.) she is very hurt and needs something louder than the hurt, something complicated enough to distract her from the loud, insistent voice saying _Never! Trust! Again!_ and nonsense like that and moreover  
C.) she has nearly given up on her sister and needs(!) to be punished for it which leads, most dangerously, to the fact that    
D.) she has grown attached to the person who set these events, unofficially or not, into motion. He has become part of her context. Who does that make her, now?  
  
Has the person she used to be become unwoven?  
  
That kind of thing. 

* * *

 The sex itself is effective. 

(These past few months have all been a ride, you see, and this is the fastest part. Inside her, and his low voice cracking in her ear—it’s a good thing she can’t see his face, because she wouldn’t be able to handle seeing the humanity she hears. And the sheer _feel_ of him… she says it once, a soft “candy”, and he stops while she adjusts until she gives him permission to continue, which is like a rolling of dangerous clouds, which is their bodies—aching, mundane things that they are—in and out and in and out, which is the solidification of something she already knew, which is his closeness and the inevitability of it—)  
  
Afterwards, she can see clearly how ridiculous this has all been. She is exhausted, and feels like she’s just been run over by a train. She has collapsed on the bed face-first and logically this position is not comfortable, but she feels she could stay here for a while, face curled into her arms.  
  
Behind her, he fixes himself and sits down on the bed. She looks up at him.  
  
“Did you recognize him?” he asks, and then he is handing her the bottle of water he keeps on his bedside table. As she accepts it, she finds herself smiling, just a little, in spite of the dissipating intensity. The orgasm had been nearly as good as the rush, the catharsis, whatever need it was that had just been satisfied.    
  
“No,” she says. “That was never you.” She pauses and summons the energy to collect herself and sit next to him. Their shoulders don’t even touch; it doesn’t feel like they’re lovers quite, in spite of it all, but there’s a softness in his eyes now and she realizes it’s been there this whole time. She’d just never noticed before.  
  
“Glad to hear it,” he says grimly. “Did it—?”  
  
“Help?” she says quickly. “Yes. Thanks. For being willing to go there for me.”  
  
“Anything,” he says, a little gruffly. It isn’t a light statement. She knows how profoundly he is tortured by decisions he felt to be unavoidable. Maybe her need was selfish. Or maybe he needed to punish himself a little too.  
  
“I know,” she says softly. “I get it. I’ll—return the favor, one day.”   
  
He laughs at that, an instinctive laugh from the gut, and she laughs too, because they both know that wasn’t what she meant.  
  
This is the truly scary thing. Sitting here, laughing with him. It’s like he’s a different person, and she wants to understand this person but—  
  
Well (unless you have a magic diary from the future, but even then) you can’t really research someone’s innermost personality. There’s only one true way to do that.  
  
And, the triangulation of desire be damned, it doesn’t involve distance.

 

* * *

 

(Maybe they’re awkward for a day or two after that, but there’s a morning when Jiya reveals the fact that she makes a _mean_ cup of coffee, even with subpar coffee makers, and tries to teach Rufus, who messes it up and stares balefully into the glop in his cup.   
  
Wyatt and Jessica are sitting at the table, trying not to laugh, and Lucy is ravenously devouring her cereal because they forgot to eat the night before. From the corner of her eye, she sees Flynn pour some of his cereal in her bowl. So subtle no one would notice.  
  
“Hon, it’s okay,” Jiya is saying to her boyfriend, who looks adorably desolate. “You’ll try again.”  
  
There’s something so temporary in the scene but… It’s nice, is all.  
  
And anyway, when she walks to the sink, Flynn follows her. “There’s something I’d like to try again, too,” he says lowly.  
  
“Let me guess,” she says quietly, glad her friends are distracted. “Something you’d like to handle more gently?”   
  
“Yes,” he says. “But that’s up to you.”  
  
She can’t quite record the way her heart sits warmly in her chest. It’s one of those feelings that just exists.)

 

* * *

   
 “Context has turned into something else in regards to research, but the role is of equally critical importance to the process. There are two layers: the original framework and the new, shifting framework. The historian has to be able to balance the two and see how they fit into the historical narrative as a whole. It’s part of what makes the whole process worthwhile.”  
  
-Lucy Preston, _On the New Impact of the Shifting Temporal Continuum_ (unpublished)


End file.
